[12] Little person, invented by the alchemists – thought to reside in sperm and to be passed to a woman at conception – see also Stewie in Family Guy

[13] George Bernard Shaw

[14] D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley's Lover Chapter 11

[15] Albert Einstein

[16] The great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead described the history of philosophy as simply "a series of footnotes to Plato".

[17] Macquarie Dictionary. This is tautological; life as the absence of death is not a very useful definition.

[18] Coleridge

[19] Milton Areopagitica

[20] Richard Dawkins 1941-The Selfish Gene (1976) ch. 2

[21] The bases are adenine (A); thymine (T); cytosine (C); and guanine (G) A bonds only with T, C with G.

[22] Written in 2000 – we now know a lot more, look it up

[23] Charles Darwin 1859 English natural historian 1809-82

[24] New Scientist 28June 2003 P20

[25] Richard Dawkins 'The Selfish Gene'

[26] See Susan Blackmore 'The Meme Machine'.

[27] Unless, of course, we cause it.

[28] Air from the Musical 'Hair' 1968

[29] U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division quoting McEvedy, Colin and Richard Jones, 1978, "Atlas of World Population History,"

[30] U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division

[31] Not even oil – long predicted to be the first cab to run out of fuel

[32] Catch 22 – ibid

[33] Byron; Don Juan - ibid.

[34] More strictly the Last Universal Ancestor (LUA) AKA Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the unicellular organism or single cell that gave rise to all life on Earth three to four billion years ago.

[35] I will leave you to ponder our moral obligation to the unborn (or never to be born) both human and no-human – if any.

Every sperm is sacred.

Every sperm is Great.

When a sperm is wasted God gets quite irate.

– Monty Python's Meaning of life

[36] Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[37] Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 – Form and Function of the Nervous System

[38] This is the prevailing view at the moment but it is in dispute and some leading scientists think that Neanderthals bred with pre-humans and were absorbed.

[93] We do not presently know any reason for the cosmological constants that determine the shape and laws of our Universe, to be as they are. There is every prospect that there are or have been other Universes in which life could not exist.

[94] Using this logic, we might be concerned that there will not be many more billions of humans in future, else why weren't we born then.

[95] Mark Twain - Letter to Mr. Burrough, 11/1/1876; Mark Twain and I

[96] Donald Rumsfeld US Secretary of Defence - May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

[97] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

[98] Cabaret – Fred Ebb, J Van Druten / C Isherwood.

[99] Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov

[100] A movie by Frederico Fellini 1960. Fellini no doubt had more reward making a great movie than the characters he portrayed did in partying and spending money. Fellini is dead – but his film goes on.

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Travel

﻿Cambodia and Vietnam

In April 2010 we travelled to the previous French territories of Cambodia and Vietnam: ‘French Indochina’, as they had been called when I started school; until 1954. Since then many things have changed. But of course, this has been a region of change for tens of thousands of years. Our trip ‘filled in’ areas of the map between our previous trips to India and China and did not disappoint. There is certainly a sense in which Indochina is a blend of China and India; with differences tangential to both. Both have recovered from recent conflicts of which there is still evidence everywhere, like the smell of gunpowder after fireworks.

Fiction, Recollections & News

Getting about

This article contains a series of recollections from my childhood growing up in Thornleigh; on the outskirts of Sydney Australia in the 1950s. My parents emigrated to Australia in 1948 when I was not quite three years old and my brother was a babe in arms.

Opinions and Philosophy

Carbon Footprints

Energy Solutions

Most informed commentators agree that Australia needs a better mix of energy sources. We are too dependent on fossil fuel. This results in a very high rate of carbon dioxide production per capita; and this has international and domestic implications in the context of concerns about climate change.